| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America. By Steven Stoll. (New York: Hill & Wang, 2002. xiv, 287 pp. $30.00,ISBN 0-8090-6431-6.)

Larding the Lean Earth invigorates the story of agriculture in American environmental history. Steven Stoll writes with the passion of one who has fallen hard for convertible husbandry and wants urgently to know why Americans left that virtuous partner at the altar and ran away to the frontier and the factory farm.

Agricultural improvers such as Jesse Buel and Edmund Ruffin flourished in the eastern states of America from the 1820s to 1840s, a moment between the capitalist and industrial revolutions marked by the legacy of exhaustive colonial farming and anxiety about frontier migration. They advocated convertible husbandry based on legume rotations and abundant use of manures. They were interested not only in permanent agriculture but also in stable agrarian society and in slowing western settlement. Stoll ties their story skillfully to antebellum sectional politics.

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